My Yoplait Brand Experience

This post is part of a series examining the effects of a recent charity campaign by Yoplait on their overall brand. You can read the first installment here.

My Yoplait Brand Experience

As I ate my Yoplait, I saw that the lid looked a little different, or at least different than I remembered.

On the lid, there was writing I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t on the container, so I assumed it was temporary.

I wouldn’t be able to decide if that was a good or a bad thing until I actually read what the lid said.

In a nutshell, I gathered that Yoplait was spreading breast cancer awareness. Super-win so far.

I’m a woman, I’d rather my breasts didn’t fall off, and I’m glad companies I interact with are going to bat to help prevent that from happening, through, I had to assume, a donation to the study of breast cancer, which would be used to attempt to find a cure.

On the lid it said “fight breast cancer” and that they were attempting to raise $1.5 million dollars.

Hey, that’s not just spare change, I thought as I read, even more pleased. I wonder if there’s something I can do to help or if they just printed it on here to let me know.

Then I saw the announcement in the middle asking me to mail my lid in-

Wait a minute.

Mail?

Like snail mail? Are you trying to call me old? Or what? How often does someone with my schedule actually go the post office to MAIL things?

Can’t I take a picture of the lid and email it?

I checked the lid for a web site.

They have a website. Which means someone there has email.

So why can’t I take a picture of my lid and email it? Or send it directly to them from my phone? Would it really cost more for them to get someone to check their email for the lids vs counting them as they come in? How much money does one lid represent anyway?

Then I saw at the end “$500,000 minimum donation.”

Oh, so if I do nothing, they’re going to make a donation anyway. Well then why should I bother myself? I’ll never remember to mail the lid in anyhow.

When I was done eating my yogurt, I crumpled up the lid as usual and put it in the container to be disposed of, as usually. (Not a typo. That’s an on-going Twitter meme based on a status update from a newbie last August. I’m Tinu on Twitter, same as here.)

Translating My Experience as a Consumer to Branding and Marketing Insights

Now, of course, how I feel about Yoplait’s efforts become more significant the more I match Yoplait’s desired demographic. Yes, every customer is important, but when you’re attempting to reach a certain subset of people, every response to a promotion is not necessarily relevant.

So, let’s do some completely unscientific deducing and presuming that is likely to be borne up by statistical information. We’ll talk about that in the next post.